The present invention relates to identifying violations of predefined rules within a visualization editing and rendering system to a declarative specification for a visualization, and more particularly to suggesting improvements in line with best practice to a declarative specification for a visualization.
Domain specific declarative languages for information visualization allow a user to specify a visualization by describing what the visualization looks like, instead of describing how to render the visualization to a screen. Such rendering of the visualization is typically described in computer code. Although these languages are expressive enough to describe a wide variety of visual mappings and styling, they don't always enforce good practice when it comes to designing visualizations. Common mistakes include the use of low contrast foreground and background colors, misuse of color such as coloring each bar in a bar chart separately, and not including legends.